Inspirational Research/Ideas – Part 2

Dumpster Dive – Game Idea

I just had a light bulb about a game idea what if we had say a vagrant raid dumpsters collecting the food waste and show the vagrant ending up a very fat man until the point of exploding like a pigeon on popping candy. Very Extreme I know but a game like this would be possible and would really indicate the ridiculous amount of food waste that we all throw out on a daily basis if a vagrant can manage to go from a rags to riches diet to the point of exploding, how cool is that.

Which Type Of Waster Are You?

Okay so the title alone would get people interested waster is usually associated with a social stature but what if people want to know what I mean by this even if they don’t this problem is easily solved by adding the word Food into the title, problem solved easy peasy..

We had talked about giving food a personality as such by creating an animation and naming the foods based on how the felt about their situation of being wasted or about to be wasted. I thought more about this and wondered what would this be like if the types of food wasters were categorised instead of the food for example :

Ignorant Individual

Angelic Foodie

Devilicious Devourer

Ditsy Dumper

Plump Pooch

These names link to the behaviours of people we had looked at that tend to waste food like the ignorant individual we had discovered that some people simply don’t care enough to even think about food waste.

Angelic Foodie, well this would be someone who doesn’t like to throw out the leftovers and will turn last nights dinner into tomorrows lunch and who would manage to make an omelette out of just about anything.

Devilicious Devourer would literally eat everything in sight because they don’t like to waste food this could be because they love the environment or maybe they don’t want to waste the money their are several options.

A Ditsy Dumper wouldn’t intentionally throw out food but just does it subconsciously and then thinks about the things they could have done with it later.

Plump Pooch would be someone who simply plumps up that pooch literally a lot of people give their left overs to the dog and use them as portable waste disposal. This isn’t always the greatest thing for a dogs health or behaviour dog food was made for a reason after all.

Having the audience divided into these categories might enable us to target each one more effectively making a short for each or some other form of output but I quite like the idea of forming a persona around the type of person that wastes food.

The Life Cycle of a Creamsicle

The Life cycle of a Creamsicle is an funny loop animation that shows the short lived life of an ice lolly. The style of this little animation made me giggle so i’m adding it for reference of a style we could adapt.

I was thinking that maybe a game could be made out of this such as “match 3” what if an interactive little game had a grid of all different food stuff and when 3 were matched an animated GIF would show how it would be eaten or combined possibly? We had talked a lot earlier in the day about how lack of adventure or knowledge had stopped people from combining left over food and combining it to cook a meal rather than see it go to waste.

Food Waste – How It Is Recycled

I stumbled across this little video of how food waste is recycled and though that this could be useful. A lot of people actually have no idea how food or even if food can be recycled but maybe if people knew the output they might feel more obliged to have an input.

Lack of knowledge is a massive factor in the food waste problem and we could may show a backwards journey of the food recycling process or other ways like sitting like a nice lunch and following the story backwards as to how you achieved your nice lunch by not throwing it in the bin after you couldn’t eat it all at dinner the night before.

Wise Up To Waste – Game

I got to thinking I wonder if there are already some food waste games out there and I found this one. This game is decision based and educates people along the way as to how they can take steps to reduce the amount of food waste and also to show them what they already don’t know.

I have included the link in order to try out the game its actually quite fun, I played it myself I have done stranger things on a Tuesday night to be honest.

I once accidentally purchased sandwich bags that came with these little animal stickers in order to seal the bag. I didn’t expect this because I wasn’t aware there was even a market for animal stickers on a sandwich bag but then again I haven’t been a kid in a while so what would I know.

This came to mind what about stickers that could be used when sealing our food for example containers with a sticker saying ‘Sorry you missed dinner” this could be quite a nice way to use leftovers for another half of housemate. Or perhaps a sticker to indicate the milk that everyone in a household is using so that people don’t just lift the first one that they see causing the older one to go off and be unused.

It would be cool if the stickers were to be quite hipster and quirky in this modern age they would fit right in. I have included a picture of some quirky food stickers courtesy of google.

As simple as this little animation seems it captures the values of food and how important food should be viewed to us.

The style allows the message to be covered in a direct and effective way and shows how the god waste problem could be solved in America.

Reflection –

I thought the research process helped me really well with establishing what was already out there and how other people had went about representing food and the issue of food waste. Commonly enough food waste was something I myself knew very little about so it was important for me to understand what was going on in the world currently in order to be able to help form this project into something that could help others with whatever medium we are going to use.

Most of the mediums were being used are campaigns heavily involved with graphic design or animations or live action videos, apps had also been attempted and a few games. As I had just done my placement working within a game development company I was very curious to know If I would be able to make a game and if I had the ability to achieve a fully functional short game.